A tribute to Stuart Hall

Jeremy Gilbert reflects on the life and work of Stuart Hall, who died Monday aged 82.

Flickr/nicholaslaughlin

Stuart Hall has died. The enormity of the loss
cannot be exaggerated. There is little point trying to measure Hall’s importance against other
significant figures: he himself would have abhorred the macho individualism of
such a gesture. But it has been a long time since the intellectual Left in the
UK has experienced such a loss, or one more keenly feared by those who may have
anticipated it. I am not going to repeat here much of the information contained
in the superb
obituary penned by my colleagues, Bill Schwarz and David Morley, and I
encourage readers to refer there first if they are unfamiliar with the basic
narrative of Hall’s life and
career.

I don’t want this piece to be about me. But it is hard for me to explain
the importance of Hall and the scope and range of his significance without
explaining the process by which I learned of it. It is also, perhaps, too much
to ask, that someone who personally owes so much to Hall should speak without
referring to their own experience somewhat. So apologies. Some of this will be
about me.

I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall as a
teenager, in the pages of the magazine Marxism Today. It’s hard to imagine today that there
was a time before Google; but there was, and in those days it wasn’t so easy to learn everything about
a writer who one only knew as a name on a byline. I didn’t know much about Cultural Studies
- although the swathe of tributes following the death of Raymond Williams, and
the occasional references in MT and the New Statesman (yes,
believe it or not, there was a time when New Statesman was a left-wing
magazine that wasn’t completely
hostile to engaging with difficult ideas) had already given me an inkling that
it might be interesting. And I didn’t know that Hall had anything to do with it: at first I assumed he
was a professional political columnist. Gradually, reading the magazine on a
monthly basis, I realised that actually he was some kind of academic. I was
impressed. I remember commenting to a sixth-form pal that this bloke Hall
seemed to talk literally the least shit of anyone I had ever come across in any
medium.

This was very important to a teenage ‘unreconstructed post-punk’ (as I would
have it) in the waning days of Thatcher’s premiership: ‘not talking shit’
was basically my criterion for what it meant to be a
successful human being. Hall’s incisive analyses of the relationship between culture, power,
technological and social change made more sense to me than anything else I had
ever read, or heard, or thought. His Gramscian understanding of Thatcherism
finally helped me to understand the apparently glaring contradictions inherent
in the Tories’
commitment to radical individualism and social
conservatism. His contributions to Marxism Today’s
‘New Times’ project
seemed to me to define what a progressive politics should look like in the
(post)modern age: working with the grain of cultural and technological
change towards democratic and egalitarian ends. It still does.

So it was, inspired by Hall’s example as much as anything, that
I ended up on a degree course in Cultural Studies at the then Polytechnic of
East London, despite the offers from far more ‘prestigious’
institutions at which I was less confident that I would
not be required, to a large extent, ‘to talk shit’. Even then I had no idea that Hall himself had been instrumentally
supportive in setting up and validating the pioneering degree programme, along with
his lifelong friend and collaborator Michael Rustin, a senior faculty member at
the institution, and had taught many of the inspiring and wonderful people who
would teach me during those three life-defining years (Alan O’Shea, who was to be Hall’s very last writing partner; Mica
Nava; Bill Schwarz; Hall’s wife Catherine, etc.). I only came to realise that a couple of
years later, when I had gone back to what became the University of East London to
try to carry on the legacy as a lecturer, while pursuing my PhD at Sussex with
another former student and colleague of Stuart’s, James Donald.

But I only fully began to appreciate the sheer
enormity of Stuart’s
contribution as I began to work out for myself what it might mean to be a
politically engaged teacher of ‘cultural studies’. For while the exotic theory in which I was so fluent - from Althusser to Zizek - was all very well for impressing fellow grad students, my
own students - working-class and intellectually curious - wanted to know what I
could tell them about the world as it was, and as it was changing. And here it
was Stuart’s method,
bringing together sociology, ideology critique, semiotics, political sociology
and necessary speculation that would prove very often the only way to address
the key question which mattered to them and to me: the question of which power
relationships were shaping our lives, and of how to understand, and potentially
how to transform them. Stuart always insisted that the key issue for cultural
studies is the issue of power, and that the key question for cultural studies,
when asking about any phenomenon whatsoever, is ‘what does this have to do with everything else.’ They are
elegant, efficient, economical dictums which serve any aspiring political or
cultural analyst well.

The exemplary instance of such ‘conjunctural analysis’ was the book
which Hall co-wrote with a team of researchers at the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and
Law and Order (1978). I’ve said this before, numerous times, but it is
simply impossible to exaggerate how impressive this book is, and the fact
is that it's importance only became apparent several years after its
publication. Let me spell it out as simply as possible: this
book predicted Thatcherism, at a time when most political commentators thought
that the Tories had made a terrible mistake in electing an obscure right-wing
leader, and that the public-sector cuts made by Dennis Healey would be a
short-term measure rather than a paradigm shift. The book begins by analysing
a simple phenomenon: the measurable disparity between a press-led ‘moral panic’
about the supposed epidemic of street robberies perpetrated
by young black men on white citizens, and the statistical non-existence of any
rise in such crime. It sets out to explain this symptomatic phenomenon using a
combination of media theory, social theory and the analytical tools offered by
the great Marxist theorists of ideology: Althusser and Gramsci. By the time the
book is finished, it has charted the emergence of those political and cultural
tendencies which were in the process of crystallising into the New Right, more
or less describing the right-wing populism which was to be precisely the basis
for Thatcher’s first two
election victories. It demonstrates like nothing else the capacity of a
synthetic, interdisciplinary combination of social science, speculative theory,
textual analysis and commentary on recent history to generate more-or-less
verifiable predictions. It
is very sad, if politically unsurprising (given what a dangerous weapon such
intellectual tools could prove in the hands of radical forces), that the
historical conditions which made possible the production of such a work -
collaborative, interdisciplinary, speculative - have not obtained in
British universities for many years, as Stuart himself was often to lament.

This was far from being Hall’s first important contribution. He
had been charting with expert precision the shifting nature of modern British
culture, and the political implications of those shifts, in the pages of New
Left Review and elsewhere since the early 60s. His essays on theoretical
topics in the 1970s were instrumental in
transmitting the ideas of Althusser, Gramsci, and Barthes to an Anglophone
audience which was not restricted to practitioners of the emerging discipline
of cultural studies (which was to become the dominant paradigm in Media
Studies, and to radically transform the study of history, literature and
sociology), but included key sections of the wider labour movement. Later, Hall
would play a similar role with regard to theories of race, ethnicity, and
post-coloniality, inspiring not only generations of critical scholars, but
artists and film-makers as well.

This aspect of Hall’s work is very widely-appreciated today, partly because it is recent
and partly because it impacted upon later cohorts of taste-makers and
commentators across a wide range of cultural fields.

What is perhaps under-appreciated now is the
enormous political influence which Hall, partly in collaboration with the
editor of Marxism Today, Martin Jacques, exerted on the British Left as it
struggled to come to terms with the defeats inflicted on it by Thatcherism in
the first half of the 1980s. The essays collected in Hall’s only single-authored volume, The
Hard Road to Renewal, remain models of lucid, theoretically informed
conjunctural analysis and political insight. Hall’s advocacy of a broad-based popular politics with which to counter
Thatcherite hegemony, and his embrace of a modernising, democratising politics
which could go beyond the traditional statism of the twentieth century Left,
were an enormous influence in opening up a range of possibilities as the 80s
came to a close. To Stuart’s dismay, it was Blairite neoliberalism which really took advantage
of this opportunity to redefine the political territory on the ‘centre-left’. But what must never be
forgotten is that it was Stuart’s version of what a ‘New Times’
socialism might look like that Blair and his colleagues
had to foreclose and neutralise in the early 90s in order to make that victory
possible.

In my 2008 book, Anticapitalism and Culture, I
suggested that the success of New Labour marked the final defeat of Hall’s New Left in the British Labour
movement. Now I think that that was wrong. The measures to democratise public
services, the explicit rejection of both bureaucratic managerialism and
neoliberal marketisation, announced by Ed Miliband only today, suggest that
Hall’s vision of a
democratic socialism (one he shared with so many on the New Left, including
that other great progenitor of cultural studies, Raymond Williams), may not
have been defeated forever by Blairism at all. As cautious as that announcement
may be, it may yet mark a decisive shift back in the direction which Stuart did
so much to help us move.

The debt which so many of us owe to Stuart is
not only a political or a collective one however. For someone like myself, it
is impossible to avoid the conclusion that without the support, intervention
and inspiration of Stuart and his many cohorts of students, there simply would
not have been careers, institutional homes, or public opportunities for people
like us at all. What would have become of this disgruntled teenager, angry,
dismayed, disillusioned with the shit-talking that saturated public-culture,
unsuited to the the life of a traditional academic institution, if Stuart and
others had not created an institutional space which could nurture us, give us a
home, enable us to grow and find a place in the world? I dread to think, but I
sometimes think that I would not have reached middle age.

Stuart’s example remains today quite a difficult one to follow. Hardly ever a solo author, by nature a great
collaborator, the competitive individualism into which aspiring young academics
are forced today was anathema to him. But as he was always the first to
acknowledge, he was in part the beneficiary, as well as one of the architects,
of the British university’s golden social-democratic age. He lamented that ‘cultural studies’ as it was
taught and practiced in most academic institutions today was too often reduced
to cultural theory, with very little in the way of conjunctural analysis going
on anywhere; yet he acknowledged that the individualisation and
instrumentalisation of the academy increasingly pushed scholars towards
personal projects with grandiose, abstract ambitions (my own would be no
exception). But it is worth reflecting that one of the places where he did see
that form of intellectual work which he so valued continuing was in fact here,
on the digital commons of openDemocracy.

Stuart’s is not an example that can be simply copied, any more can be that
of any life. But his work carries on; directly, through the efforts of his
colleagues at the journal Soundings (see here,
for example), and indirectly through the activity of the countless lives,
careers, ideas, initiatives, creation, dislocations and collaborations which he
has inspired and made possible. No better tribute is possible than that we
should do what we can to bring to fruition the many possibilities that he
discerned in the culture and politics of our epoch, to which he opened so many
of our eyes.

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